Christopher Buehlman’s Those Across the River delivered “an unsettling brew of growing menace spiked with flashes of genuine terror.”* Now, the World Fantasy Award-nominated author stakes a bloody claim on vampire mythology in this chilling horror novel.... New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live. And die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody—he's spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city’s sidewalks.   The subways are his playground and his highway, shuttling him throughout Manhattan to bleed the unsuspecting in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park or in the backseats of Checker cabs, or even those in their own apartments who are too hypnotized by sitcoms to notice him opening their windows. It’s almost too easy.   Until one night he sees them hunting on his beloved subway. The children with the merry eyes. Vampires, like him…or not like him. Whatever they are, whatever their appearance means, the undead in the tunnels of Manhattan are not as safe as they once were.   And neither are the rest of us.   WINNER OF THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION’S BEST HORROR NOVEL OF THE YEAR * New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson “Buehlman offers up a colony of fierce, brazenly unscrupulous vampires who reclaim the genre from angsty goths and return it to its fearsome and ferocious origins.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review)   “Surprising, scary, and, ultimately, heartbreaking…Sheerly amazing.”—Tor.com   “A ferocious and funny look at vampires living in 1978 New York City.”—Dread Central Christopher Buehlman is the winner of the 2007 Bridport prize for poetry and the author of five horror novels including Those Across the River (best novel nominee, 2012 World Fantasy Awards), medieval apocalypse fable Between Two Fires , chilling vampire tale The Lesser Dead (Named best horror novel of 2015 by the American Library Association), and goblin war fantasy The Blacktongue Thief . A native Floridian, the author currently lives in Ohio with a wife he doesn’t deserve and a snow-shoveling regimen he probably does.   For Terry White (That’s my aunt. She was a stewardess and model in the seventies. There’s a reasonable chance she did cocaine at Studio 54.) (Don’t put that part in the dedication.) FOR STARTERS I’m going to tell you about a year. This year. 1978. A lot of shit is happening and I think somebody had better write it down before we all forget. New York City is the place. If you’re looking for a story about nice people doing nice things, this isn’t for you. You will be burdened with an unreliable narrator who will disappoint and repel you at every turn. Still with me? Too bad for you. I can’t wait to break your heart. I’m going to take you someplace dark and damp where good people don’t go. I’m going to introduce you to monsters. Real ones. I’m going to tell you stories about hurting people, and if you like those stories, it means you’re bad. Shall we go on? Good. I hate people who pretend they’re something they’re not. We’re going into the tunnels. We’ll start up here in Chelsea; there’s a bricked-up ground-level window with half the bricks out, not a big space but big enough, then we’ll go deeper, down where I stay. Where we stay. I hope bad smells don’t bother you. I hope you brought your own light; I don’t need one. I hope you’re not fat. Here’s a little taste of what you’re in for, out of sequence, but I told you how unreliable I am. It’s not all this nasty, but this is probably rough if you’re not used to it. If you can get through this, we can hang out. *   *   * We heard them before we saw them. Hunchers. That’s what we called people who hunched in the tunnels. We stayed in the tunnels too of course, the deeper tunnels where no sunlight came at all, but we weren’t Hunchers. We weren’t even people anymore. When Margaret saw that her home had been broken into, she didn’t hesitate. She tossed off her flip-flops and marched right for the open trapdoor with me behind her, not caring whether I followed, not caring how many of them there were, and there had to be at least two to pull the chain and get that trapdoor up—it was a big heavy bastard of a door made from part of an old subway car and broken-up seats. She walked with one hand balled on her hip, her stained bathrobe open enough to see her tit if you cared to. She was pissed. It was her place, after all. She was our duly elected mayor. “Goddamn it,” she whispered, kicking a peeping shower of rats out of her way. She picked up and threw down a shred of a hamburger wrapper in disgust. Whoever they were, they had brought food. You don’t bring food into the loops. They had tied belts together to lower themselves into the hole. A weak light danced down there, a flashlight, and I heard the sound of a lighter. Some